The present invention relates to fruit processing equipment and more particularly concerns an improved citrus juice extractor having a cantilevered drive system.
The extraction of juice from citrus fruits such as oranges has been accomplished successfully for a number of years using well known interdigitating cups and orifice tube type juice extractors. Such extractors are made by the FMC Corporation and have been disclosed in now expired U.S. Letters Patent. Improvements to the basic two cup interdigitating extractors continue to be made however.
The invention set forth herein is an improved two cup interdigitating fruit juice extractor that is designed to have a lower height or profile as compared to currently available two cup interdigitating juice extractors due to a unique drive system. This compact design is directly due to the cantilevered arms of the unit being driven by the unit's crank arm drive assembly. One object of this invention is to provide juice extracting equipment that has high yield capability and better juice quality than existing juice extractors for point of sale installations such as fruitstands, supermarkets and in mobil equipment.
The prior art two cup interdigitating juice extractors are large machines that have been designed for high volume production situations. Numbers of these large, high volume juice extractors would be ganged together in the juice room of a juice producer to take advantage of the economies of scale of shipping fruit to a central location, storage and processing of large quantities of fruit juice and packing and shipping of the juice.
This invention is not necessarily directed at providing equipment for a large juice extractor plant, but, as stated earlier is designed for the high yield production of juice and high quality juice at relatively low volumes for point of sale installations.
Other point of sale or portable juice extractors exist however none that incorporate the two cup interdigitating fruit cups and the orifice tube apparatus with the drive disclosed herein are known to the applicants. Typically point of sale juice extractors are not as selective in juice extracting--that is, extracting juice having low oil content and low incidences of seeds and pulp--as the instant invention.
By providing a cantilevered drive system a very sophisticated juice extractor can be packaged in a fraction of the space taken up by a conventional two cup extractor as the vertical drive mechanism of the conventional, well known extractor is not used.
The manner in which these and other features of the present invention can be obtained in practice will be apparent from the following detailed description of a preferred embodiment of the invention.